walter white standing with his wife by a money pile

Building a Bankroll II

Building a Bankroll II

Section
Poker Basics
Category
Money Management

How do I move up the stakes the best and fastest way? In this episode of Project Get Me Stackin', Evan discusses the most effective ways to build a bankroll in the shortest time possible.

What’s the best way to build a bankroll? This is a question every single poker player has asked themselves, or been asked by someone else at least once in their career. It’s a difficult question, but really the best answer is to find a field of players you know you can beat and exploit their weaknesses. Don’t try to take on a better field until you’re sure you can beat them too.

SO WHERE ARE THE WEAKEST FIELDS?

The weakest fields I have found come under the FPP SnG section of the Sunday Million. They are 2 FPP and 10 FPP buy-ins respectfully, with the 2 FPP buy-in having 100 runners and the 10 FPP having 20 runners. They are both the first of a 5 round satellite to the Million with the first place finisher in each winning a seat to round 2 worth 200 FPP. 

WHAT MAKES THESE TOURNAMENTS SO GOOD FOR BUILDING A BANKROLL?

1. Building up FPP’s

Once you are victorious in one of these tournaments and you have gained your seat into round 2, you will still be able to play round 1 tournaments, and should you win another, you would be credited 200FPP’s to your balance instead of a seat in round 2. Now 200 FPP’s may not seem like a lot, but for any player on PokerStars, even as a BronzeStar, 1000 FPP’s is worth $10. These SnG’s run all week and on top of being able to build up your FPP balance to trade in for cash on Sunday you get to play round 2 and have a chance of satelliting into the Sunday Million, a tournament worth $215 that regularly pays over $150,000 for 1st place.

2. The players are very bad and easily exploitable

The average player in these tournaments will have no emotional investment in the tournament at all, since 10 FPP’s is easily obtainable and probably means nothing to them, so the decisions they make will be far from optimal. You will regularly see players in these tournaments fold their big blind with less than 1 big blind left behind - and just as regularly you'll see other players call 10 BB shoves with 52o. 

3. There’s no rake in FPP tournaments

Consider you play and 20 person SnG with a $1.10 buy-in, with the winner taking all. PokerStars would take a $0.10 rake from every buy-in. So first place prize would be $20. In this case, if you won 1/20 tournaments, with a field of 20 players, because of the rake you wouldn’t break even on your investment. 

Same tournament, except this time the buy-in is 10 FPP’s with no rake. First prize would be 200FPP’s and winning 1/20 tournaments would allow you to break even. So in these tournaments, even having the slightest of edges over the field will yield you a profit. 

4. Minimal time investment

Throughout the week on average a SnG will start every 5 minutes, and will take 4 minutes to play all the way through. On a Sunday one will start every 2 minutes on average and take 4 minutes to play.

5. Unlimited Push/Fold and ICM study

Considering how rarely you will have more than 20 BB in these Hyper-Turbo tournaments, most, if not all of the play is pre-flop. Meaning that after your session, you can use a program like ICMizer to gain extremely valuable knowledge, not just for these tournaments, but also for later in your poker career when you’re regularly making final tables.

Some things to beware of.

Since you start out with 4 big blinds, there is going to be a lot of not so stellar hands coming up against quite stellar hands. The thing to remember when grinding these tournaments is that, yes, you are going to be highly profitable in the long run, and you’ll be playing against players you can crush, but it’s still poker, and bad beats and downswings happen in all forms of poker.